In the docudrama Radiant City, written and directed by Gary Burns and Jim Brown and just out on DVD, one scene captures the mess made by our "way of life." Author and critic James Howard Kunstler is standing on an asphalt bike and jogging path affixed to a brand new subdivision that more resembles a moonscape with houses. Traffic whizzes by Kunstler on either side of a chain-link fence, barely five feet away. As the wind from the SUVs' acceleration blows his necktie to and fro, Kunstler tries to explain why this pathetic little amenity—slapped onto the landscape by some designer in an office cubicle hundreds of miles away—is an "assault on your neurology" with the "ambience of a prison."
And, of course, Kunstler is correct. We are in a prison of consumption and desire, trapped by urges and, until now, America's ability to supply even the most frivolous knick-knack 24/7, including 2,000-square-foot homes with five-car garages. Kunstler is articulate, funny and passionate, which is why he's marginalized by the conventional wisdom shapers. But consider what he is saying in Radiant City, things like "80 percent of architecture now on earth was built in the past 50 years" and "most of it is brutal, depressing, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading… Potemkin Village malls with parking lagoons and Orwellian office parks." All of this, however, has a "tragic element" beyond mere aesthetics.
That is—and here's the scary part—in the "energy-scarce future," these same suburbs to which people have "escaped," with their measly bike/running paths and color-coded homes and bucolic names that bear no resemblance to anything on the landscape ("Oak Grove"? Show me the oaks, please, show me the groves), are in serious trouble. Furthermore, the financial shell game—zoning laws that favor sprawl, the spreading of population farther from public transportation hubs, the destruction of our rail system, the fakery of the financial cons that prop up this Radiant City—is on the verge of collapse.
As Kunstler says on his provocative blog Clusterfuck Nation (http://www.kunstler.com), "This is not so much financial bad weather as financial climate change. Something is happenin' Mr. Jones, and you don't know what it is, do ya? There has been too much misbehavior and it can no longer be mitigated. We're not heading into a recession but a major depression, worse than the fabled trauma of the 1930s. That one occurred against the background of a society that had plenty of everything except money. Back then, we had plenty of mineral resources, lots of trained-and-regimented manpower, millions of productive family farms, factories that were practically new, and more than 90 percent left of the greatest petroleum reserve anywhere in the world. It took a world war to get all that stuff humming cooperatively again, and once it did, we devoted its productive capacity to building an empire of happy motoring leisure. (Tragic choice there.)"
He calls the new Depression "The Long Emergency" (the title of his bestselling book, which should be required reading). It is, he says, the logical end result of a society that has squandered all of its oil, torn down its factories and outsourced jobs, leveled family farms as well as "Main Street" shopping areas and "trained its population to become overfed diabetic TV zombie 'consumers' of other people's productivity, paid for by 'money' they haven't earned."
A harsh dose of the truth is hard to swallow. Whether one accepts what Kunstler says may be beside the point, too. The handwriting is all over the walls of Radiant City.
